


one more look at the ghost

by TeratoCybernetics



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F, Grimdark, Horrorterrors - Freeform, Illustrated, Other, Post-Sburb, Tentacles, Transformation, gratuitous occult fuckery, selfcest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-26
Updated: 2012-12-26
Packaged: 2017-11-22 11:40:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/609439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TeratoCybernetics/pseuds/TeratoCybernetics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Faced with the mundanity of post-game life and domestic bliss, Rose gets restless, starts testing the bounds of her recreated world, as well as her own sanity.</p>
            </blockquote>





	one more look at the ghost

**Author's Note:**

  * For [JackOfNone](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JackOfNone/gifts).



> Prompt: 'I would love something exploring Rose's fascination with the macabre. Maybe something developing her relationship with the Horrorterrors, or perhaps her being really interested in a female troll's alien body or Kanaya's death wound. Really, anything about Rose being totally OK with and/or absolutely fascinated the creepy, the gross, or the totally sanity-blasting would be awesome. Any rating is acceptable, and if you want to go explicit I'm totally down for body horror, guro, and anything else you can cram in there.'
> 
> Of all the prompts I was given, this was the one that grabbed me by the face. I read it and immediately thought of a post-game Rose, complete with her tendency to poke at things she shouldn't with a sharp stick, dropped into something resembling an everyday, normal life and hating all of it like a leashed cat. All of that found an initiation narrative and my recent rereading of House of Leaves, and ran away with it like it stole something.

No one tells you how, after you become a god and remake a universe from nothing, living an everyday, mundane life can pale, some. Never mind that your bar for ‘normal’ is, itself, set at a strange height. That’s not the least of what’s lodged somewhere uncomfortable in your thoughts. Tiny air bubbles tickle their way up your back from the bottom of the tub, and the water is hot enough to make your head swim. Up to your chin in scented froth and penetrating heat, the itching, aching normalcy of everything is pushed back a little. You can take a step back from whatever problem is at hand and find a better perspective from within a cloud of fragrant steam. Even when the problem is, quite literally, everything you are regarding.

The bathroom in this place is a cavernous, glorious thing that had been your main selling point on the apartment. Kanaya had been politely baffled at the way the clawfooted steel tub became your compass point, your _fetiche_ , up until moving night when finally only you two remained. You’d pulled her in, filthy moving clothes and all, and set to the merciless and completely necessary work of stripping them away to see just how brightly you could make her glow. The heating bill for the place is going to be atrocious come winter, it’s all windows, concrete and brick, but cold doesn’t bother her much, and you figure you can retreat here when it gets too bad. You’ll become semi-aquatic, soaking until you are more of an ectobiological stew than a young woman come March or so, won’t that be nice? And there’s a fireplace.

You prop your feet on the edge, sink back until water tickles at your upper lip, and consider the threads of your restlessness. There are many of them, but they all lead essentially to the same place. It’s been nearly three years since the game. There are still very few things you could not dispatch with needles in hand, thanks to frequent sparring sessions on the roof as well as picking up yoga; the only softening is due to the fact that you’re actually eating, and it tends to be real food, more often than not. You’ve grown out the doll-like bob to something a little bit longer, you’re scarred here and there from all that’s happened, but it’s still you, close enough to the same to make you want to bite something. You wouldn’t say you were feeling spiteful, though it could be seen that way. It’s closer to ‘disillusioned’, and maybe looks a little bit like ‘cheated’, in the right light. Writing about the baffling, insane things that have happened, no matter how many Complacency fans snap up this new mythos of yours, only goes so far when the reality you made remembers exactly nothing of what transpired or your hand in it bringing it back from nothing and dust. There should be some sign on the world of all that happened other than your memories; things like that should scar a place. You’d spent most of your adolescence immersed in madness, wanting nothing more than the return of the world that had fallen to pieces around you. Now, all you can find in you is the itch to pull it all apart once again, just because it would be so much more _satisfying_ than this.

The peculiar thing is, the Light is still there.

You’re not quite a god anymore, but you can still close your eyes and see probability itself spread out before you, a shining garden of forking paths. Unlike the trolls’ presence, rewritten neatly into history books with a crashed, stolen ship of refugees and half a century of fascinating culture clashes to make them part of what stands for normal now, there’s no precedent for it, no inarguably efficacious magical tradition whose ranks are designated by brightly coloured pajamas. But despite the lack of footprints, the Light has guided you since the need to piece together something resembling a normal life became a concern.

_What else is still there, behind the cracks in things, if I figure out where to fit my fingers and pry?_

You don’t emerge until the water goes dull, but that thought stays the entire rest of your bath and then some, remaining insistent even while you dry off and pad into the bedroom. Kanaya is unconscious already, her need for sopor immersion replaced with a simple patch applied to one wrist. She’s snoring lightly, a blanket pulled up to her nose, and something fond in your chest tightens as you pass her and step into the muffled closeness of the closet. It would probably be a full-on walk-in if you hadn’t stuffed it full of the boxes you don’t feel like dealing with yet, stacking them higher than your head and flanking the entrance. On a shelf behind the clothes you have actually bothered to hang up, you find a wooden wine box, and within that, wrapped tight in several of the scarves you made on the meteor, rests the Thorns.

Of the handful of touchstones all of you possess that survived the reboot, very few still seem to carry a puissance, but the needlewands remain stubborn about their nature. Whatever they’re made of is cold to the touch, not quite like metal, wood or bone in texture. They’re far heavier than they look, and a crawling sort of luminous in this dim light.

 Come here.

After staring at them for long moments, feeling on a precipice and yes, questions brimming with sour, wordless questions, you prick yourself with them, once each in the centre of your palms, just enough to draw a bead of blood. It seems right, somehow.

... tributarytributetosoundthesummonstocallusdown...

Then you return to the bed, tuck them beneath your pillow, strip, and slip in as quietly as you can. You’re not sure when you fall asleep, but it doesn’t take long. You’re warm and loose-limbed from your bath, and you’d already chased it off with tea and spite for far too long.

The dream that comes with it coils around you, immense and lightless. There is very little to it in terms of a visual element; the only thing that sticks is a turbulent sky, lowering and portentious. It should fill you with dread, but does not. It feels like home and comfort, like an important message from someone as dear as any of your friends, and that 'should' renders you more afraid than any of what it represents.

Without warning, with the simple fluidity of dreams, there is a break in the lightlessness. You look down, and your fingers are glowing, spectral light bleeding off of them, and it is all so utterly pedestrian. Moving of their own volition, they begin to write something in trails of light, and whatever it is clings to the air in front of you before winking out, just that little bit too long to be an afterimage.

You’re clutching something when you wake, holding tight enough to hurt.

Sitting up, you stare at marks swimming dark on dark, scrawled near-blindly on a notepad from your nightstand. Even in this light, you can tell it is no language you have ever seen written before, and that it is the same three ideograms, over and over. They’re made of spirals and barbs that itch peculiarly in the base of your skull, tease at understanding. Stuffing it in the bedstand drawer doesn’t help smooth out the jagged speed of your heartbeat. It’s not until light begins to stab through the edges of your blackout curtains that you can stop wondering why the fuck you’re back to stirring these waters, for long enough to sleep again.

That night’s mad scrawlings become the first entry in a Grimoire of your very own.

You knew that the one you grew up with could only hold your hand for so long, as well as that most traditions you could think of call for the practitioner to make one, either eventually or as they go. Now you know why. Comparing this to the older translation is like comparing hundred year old scotch to doing keg stands of Yuengling. It’s like they didn’t even _try_.

It’s a few days before you manage to pick apart the layers in what you wrote down, first copying it in a clearer hand, then appending your notes in a Borgesian unfolding of notes and subnotes and footnotes spreading like a stain off of the original information.As a conveyance of ideas, this particular version of the Outer Circle’s language is oddly structured. It peels away in implications and intimations; they speak in layers. Focusing on the whorls and shapes unspools it into meaning, somehow.  Your first impression of their meagre and repetitive opening salvo is a name for their way-opener, their gate and key, as well as how to approach them, all in an epithet; they are a quiet, starless night, and a cold, black expanse of water. They are a thing placated by a gift of salt and bones. They are that which flows beneath.

It seems almost insultingly easy; you have an empty wine bottle filled with sea salt and powdered bone meal in little time. There is a hippie-run nursery down the street from the Whole Foods, the one grocer around that keeps troll hours, which seems to be more often a concern for you than Kanaya, hilariously enough. The latter has salt from several different oceans, in a bewildering array of colours, and the nursery? They give you a pint sample of bone meal for your 'rooftop garden’ plans, no fuss at all except for the cheerful old oliveblooded hippie running the place pale-hitting on you mercilessly. But it’s maddening weeks before you get a night to yourself that’s as dark as it needs to be.

You tell yourself that you’re not hiding this, that you fully intend to tell Kanaya exactly what is going on, but not until you yourself are capable of answering questions about it. As things are, you’re still groping around a bit blindly, and if Kanaya knew that, she’d put a stop to it before you managed to get anywhere with your experiments. She’s never approved of this particular fascination, and one of the things you love about her is that she can see straight through your bullshit. Making up answers that you don’t have is right the fuck out, so you wait, and hope it will go better if you have some actual information and something like a point to it to show her exactly why you’ve been skulking about. It’s completely not that you’re kind of terrified that the 'why' you have now amounts to an elaborate way of saying ‘I’m bored.’.

Sometime mid-November, opportunity comes in the form of her leaving for a candlelit hate date of some kind or another, with some appallingly highstrung coldblood she’s met online. It seemed like a desperate choice to you when a caller with a distinct, lilting seatroll accent asked if you were Kanaya’s ‘housebroken human’, but Kanaya argues that it’s been difficult for her to find someone to tear into now that Vriska’s moved half the planet away to dive shipwrecks for treasure. Apparently being the shining undead is fairly offputting, and the fact that her weapon of choice is a chainsaw half of the time only makes things worse. Who would have even begun to guess?

 An hour passes while you finish up as much of the chapter you’re working on as you can stand, and you get no desperate texts begging for rescue, either blindly punched in beneath a table, out of disgust dampened by boredom, or terse, but perfectly punctuated, spelled and in-quirk, from the trunk of a car. Both have happened before. Waiting yields neither explosion nor drama, so you guess things are going exactly as poorly as they should be. You head to the bedroom to change into some underthings you don’t care much about, throwing on a long coat over this. Your information thus far hints that contact, _touch_ is important with this one; shoes are almost an afterthought. Your offering is tucked into one voluminous coat pocket, the Thorns into the other.

 Your apartment is close enough to water for you to walk there, at the junction of a fairly gentrified area, a former warehouse district, and a borough that’s been optimistically described as ‘transitional’, in a converted factory. Were you anyone else, the neighbourhood might be a reason for pause. As things have been, some part of you bares its teeth and asks politely for any kind of break in the monotony. Of course, it never complies.

Your shoes crunch on grit and gravel, tap quietly across hard-packed dirt. It’s a sharply cool night, beginning the slide into outright cold. A penetrating dampness to the air flattens the distant sound of cars on roads not visible from here, promises some kind of precipitation before morning. The only light is the far-off glow of the bridge and a sickly pinkish smear across the horizon in the direction of the city. Next to an ancient, fragmenting pier, you find a place worn flat; probably a spot to cast small craft from during the day. Sliding the coat off, your skin immediately prickles, all the little hairs on your arms standing to. You find a dry place to leave it and your shoes, take your things from the pockets, and steel yourself before stepping in.

The water’s not as frigid as the air would have you believe, though it’s far from warm or pleasant, and still cold enough to make you gasp. Mud compresses and slides between your toes, something wriggles away past your ankles as you slosh forward. You quell all thoughts of what else might be in the slime despite careful steps; medical waste, broken bottles, worse things even than those. Everything smells of river, of mud-things and water-things, decay and change. You stop when the water reaches your waist, just shy of a sudden dropoff in the riverbed that your toes curl over. Glancing around, you make certain you are still alone, and that you can still see your things. The night tenses, draws itself in close, the amphibian scent of the river heightened, mingling with the rain-promise smell of ozone, the feathery edge of it that may mean snow before dawn. Your teeth chatter, and it is only through immense effort that you are not shivering too hard to do anything else. You take a deep breath, uncork the bottle, whisper-chanting an approximation of the epithet you were given, over and over, a sound full of intricate sibilants. When you get it right, it matches the hiss of coarse salt and bone disappearing into the water and slides into reality itself like a key fitting a lock.

There is nothing, at first. Then, blackness.

You’ve only seen such lack of feature in a sky in paradox space. The water becomes less murky, sedimented, and more like dark glass. The far shore is no longer anywhere to be seen. Turning, clamping down hard on the fear beginning to rise in your throat, neither is the one you stepped off of, what little there is to see falls away into nothing. If it wasn’t for a faint reflection off the water, you’d be hard-pressed to say whether or not you’d gone blind.  _Well, all good Seers are blind, it was only a matter of time._

One of the Thorns in each hand, you spin around slowly, trying to pay attention to all sides at once, as your footing grows uncertain. You open the lens inside your head that means the Light, extend it out like whiskers, and find nothing but a haze of uncertainty. Something immense moves through the water, a riptide pulling you free of whatever ground had still been there, though you continue to float. It’s land mass-huge, hints of light seeping off it, half-describing a sinuous form and a single, enormously alien eye.

Ice-slick tendrils reach out of the water, and you close your eyes, breath held and shaking, ready to accept the price for your idiocy. What you expect does not come, you are not dragged away to madness or drowning, broken or wrapped up like a gift for further iniquities. Instead, the smallest of the half a dozen appendages that you can see find your lips, touching there briefly as if hushing you, before leaving a small, wet spot in the centre of your forehead. The dampness coming off of it smells sharp, like ozone and alkali, snow and salt. You think of baptism, and everything goes so still you almost forget to start breathing again, not wanting to mar that silence.

~~let us in~~

...

~~open the gate the key is yours is you~~

...

It’s the return of distant traffic noises that lets you know whatever it was has passed. You find yourself back in the river, in the world you know, still mostly naked and freezing your tits off, but also electric, thrumming head to toe with whatever just touched you. It’s all you can do to make it back to the apartment at a sprint, dripping and ecstatic, to throw the Thorns into their box and write everything down, scribble out rough drawings, all while running a bath. You only just manage to rinse off the river’s silt and sink into it before Kanaya comes home, ragged and sated and looking for a lighter touch. Her split lip tastes like salt, and she joins you readily, for once.

It’s only as you’re drifting off with her face half-buried in your hair and one arm splayed across you, that you realise you left your coat and shoes at the waterfront.

Almost a week after the river, that night has faded to a dream, to less than that. You’d retrieved your coat and shoes, muddy but intact, and disposed of the underthings you’d worn for your swim, vowing to pick up a goddamned swimsuit if this went on much longer. It’s difficult to think about your recent extracurriculars with any gravity, this far after the fact. In the face of sunlight and civilisation, mundanities like laundry and groceries, the idea of tentacled horrors from beyond seems patently, disappointingly unreal. You’ve stared at your notes off and on, and the more time passes, the more they look like the ramblings of someone desperately trying to make their life more interesting by fixating on this laughable nightmare.

You are awakened sometime around noon at the end of the week by a muffled version of  'Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems’, as rendered by your violin and played back to you by your phone; it's the ringtone you chose for your agent. She’s begging after a late handful of signed copies for some kind of promotion. You grope after some idea of what the hell she’s talking about, then realise you had signed them, put them back in the box, and set them where they were promptly assimilated into the paper-and-tea-stained-ceramic landscape of your desk and thus forgotten.

Managing to mumble something like assent and a civilised end to the call, you extract yourself from bed, locate the box, ready and labeled and everything but sent off, all without even fully opening your eyes. It would have to be overnighted, giving you an excuse to send a package for Dave and Terezi that’s begun to accumulate a layer of receipts and post-its, prizes from a recent thrift store expedition. For him, a plastic Playmobil stair-car you’ve primered in black and decorated with ‘IT KEEPS HAPPENING’ in baroque silver calligraphy, and for her, a hideously colourful sequined dragon-motif belt that may have escaped from Cyndi Lauper’s closet sometime before any of you were born.

You shamble out to the kitchen to find Kanaya perched on a stool at the counter, watching last night’s ‘So You Want To Be A Fashionistroyer’ on your laptop. She hands you a mug of coffee and an envelope without looking up when you set down the parcel, and you say nothing about her atrocious taste in television, instead leaning over to kiss her good afternoon. She does look up then, turning towards your movement.

Her eyes are not hers. They are black and hollow and filled with tendrils. The light from outside dims and thins like a sudden cloud has passed over the sun.

[...

...]

Something like ink seeps from between her lips.

She opens her mouth to speak, and more of it flows out, pooling in her cupped hands,

writhing between them, accompanied by a sound like rushing water and static and a swarm of insects.

You go cold, backing away, blinking rapidly as if to clear what you’re seeing from your eyes,

and her voice surfaces from the din filling your head.

[...]

“ _Rose_. Rose? Are you well? Should you perhaps go back to bed? I know you did not sleep until very late, even for you.” Her eyes are hers again, like nothing ever happened, the green of spring-into-summer against autumn-gold.You shake your head, drain half the coffee in one go. Whatever it was, it’s gone.

“No. No, I’ll be fine. Just...stood up too fast, had a little bit of dizziness.” A thought comes as if placed whole into your head; _It wants blood. Whatever this one is, it wants blood._

Kanaya squints at you as if expecting you to fall over at any moment, then shrugs lightly when you do not, returning her attention to Alternian-language trash television and double-fisting a mug of coffee and another of cloned blood. Today’s is a deep tawny-bronze. You glance at the envelope and what you’d pulled from it; a check, confirming that today is going to be a running errands sort of day. The freezer is kind of bare, and if you’re going out anyway, it only makes sense. “How is the studio project going?”

“Tedious.” Kanaya has been working on a line of winter clothing with a troll design house out of Philly, with the possibility of more collaboration later if all goes well. Their deadline is fast approaching, and you know she’s winding up for another ten-hour day in her little studio by levelling her conscious mind with the dumbest things she can enjoy watching. She doesn’t seem to have registered the blip in reality, only your reaction to it. “I have had a bullbeast of a time convincing the blueblood on staff, who is almost as uptight about caste as Zahhak-and damn him for that still being a thing here-that not everything needs to clatter with buckles and zippers.”

“I have to go to the store today, anyway, a check has finally arrived to relieve me of the monotony of black coffee for breakfast. I’ll pick up your repast in something close to your irritation’s shade if, the next time they need you on video chat, you promise to glow brilliantly whilst sipping on it from one of our best wineglasses. If you let me watch their reaction, all the better.”

“And I can perhaps hold something about my hatedate with the newest seadweller representative from Manhattan over her head if she gets too awful, I guess.” Kanaya half-grins before stretching and yawning like a cat, just as completely innocent of the display of dentition, her greenish-black tongue curling with the force of it before she runs her hands through sleep-rumpled hair. Your girlfriend is rarely more endearing than she is first thing in the day, when all her defenses are down and she’s just...herself, sleep-fogged and languid. Unsettling visions are instantly punted to the back of your mind for later consideration, in favour of wrapping arms around her shoulders and leaning into her hair. You can’t help but wonder why it can’t always be like this, why you can’t always be this satisfied by simplicity. You smile against the soft fuzz on the back of her neck.

“Oh, and why aren’t you kicking this one beneath a table with your sharpest stilettos whilst glaring at her over the course of a fabulous dinner, instead of the politician?”

“That’s not a good way to start this kind of working connection.”

“Fair.”

“Not to mention that she irritates me in a completely unattractive way. She wears _capris_.”

“How does one manage to be sexy while annoying someone, again, do tell? Inquiring minds.” She glances back to make absolutely certain you’re kidding; laughing and rolling her eyes when she’s proven right. “Okay, I need to go and send some things to Carrie before the post office closes. Do we need anything around here that’s not food?”

“I need some fang cleaning paste before I have to use your cloying mint kind, but I think that’s it.” That goes on the mental list. You might pick up a compromise that both of you can stand the taste of, even. Kanaya gathers up the laptop and her remaining beverages, and plants a small kiss on your forehead before she makes her way to her little workroom. By the time you’ve finished your own coffee, returned to the bedroom to change, and brushed your teeth, you’re hearing what you think might be Ayreon, turned up until the bass notes thrum and rattle the windows.

Of all of the music the both of you dove into that first year or so back, in order to play catch-up, the last thing you ever expected to stick to her was a fervent love of prog-metal rock operas. It seems to help her work, burying herself in a little bower made of fabric and a myriad plants and those loud, loud stories set to music, and it’s kind of grown on you, too. They’re technically proficient, and there are often wizards involved. Smiling at this without really trying to help it, you pull on the heavy orange hoodie your God-pajamas seem to be masquerading as in this reality, find the car keys on the floor next to a row of shoes, and head out into a brittle-bright day.

It’s all Kanaya’s fault, at that point, when you rummage around beneath the front seat of your shitty little black Volvo until you find a burned cd scrawled with ‘The Sword’, and slide it into the cd player. It’s an excellent soundtrack for your drive up the largely empty access road that leads towards town, winding along beside the river. To one side, warehouses and winter-brown weeded lots, side-streets branching off towards other bits of the outskirts of town. To the other, bone-bare trees and grey water. There’s probably a more direct route, but the sweep of the access roads’ curves are the closest you’ve come to flying since you got back, and it’s usually empty enough that you can lay on the gas and just let go..

By the time you’re at the end of your favourite stretch and at the first light, you’re drumming along on the steering wheel with the music; not very accurately, but then again, you’re not trying at all. Instead, you’re going over the day, and the weird feinting dance you’ve been enacting with...something. Several somethings? You’re loathe to say they’re the Horrorterrors you remember, but then again, what you call someone and how you do it tends to colour how they respond to you. Younger-you had absolutely no sense and a great deal of arrogance, shouting Names into the void and seeing what bothered to answer her demands. They did what they did for and to you during the game because you could hear them, and your goals dovetailed, but they weren’t kind in the least about it.

The light goes green, and you turn left. A FedEx truck that had slowed across the intersection stops, then begins turning right anyway, but too slow and too wide, bringing you far too close to one another for your comfort. You wind up a response to this involving someone'se mother, someone else's lusus and improbable uses of food that would make Karkat blush, but that’s not what comes out.

 

[... _burnburnburnfuckyouburn_..]

What comes out of your throat is not your voice. It is so, so inhuman, a sound like breaking, and the truck’s windshield begins to warp as you watch. Scorch spreads across the nose of the vehicle, blackening the shiny white paint. You’re so very lucky instinct takes over and steers you away with one foot on the gas; in the next breath, the other driver jumps the sidewalk and wow, you are absolutely not sticking around to make things any worse, not with your heart in your throat and fury coiled in your lungs like fire, and no idea how to keep any of it under conscious control.

Glancing in the rearview, you do see someone climb out of the vehicle, dazed but whole, thank fuck, and another car pulling over to see what happened before you crest a hill and begin to descend the other side. You’ve put another block between you and the almost-wreck when you unlock your fingers from the steering to stretch them, and note a familiar, vaporous grey seeping off of them. The sight dredges up memories; blood on a white dress, a lowering cloud, vast as cities and still dwarfed by the indescribable hate it mirrored in you. Your hands tremble before you take a deep breath, set your jaw and will the shaking away, maybe leaning on the gas a little too heavily as you power through your disgust at this sudden cowardice. _I asked for this. I practically fucking begged for this, that was a pact, that night with the Thorns, and as stupid as that might have been, I am going to put on my big girl underthings, and deal with this to the end._

After this, errands run smoothly, maybe suspiciously so. There is almost no one at the post office despite it being so close to closing, and your parcels are dealt with in record time. Your stop through the Whole Foods takes longer, but that’s primarily because your visit a week ago conveniently forgot actual food in the interests of arcane research projects. You get several enormous boxes of the least sugar-laden instant oatmeal they have, a handful of frozen pizzas, two large bottles of cloned blood for Kanaya in forest-green and deep empyrean blue, the promised fang paste in...aloe? Yes, you think you can stand that, eyeing the other choices. Cucumber, you get. It’s unobtrusive, same as the aloe. But persimmon? Nacho? And you still haven’t figured out what the hell a bitterbulge vine is, not that you exactly care to.

You pick up a square of gingerbread from the bakery for the way home from one of the premature holiday tables. Nearby, on a refrigerated display of various holiday-related foods, among free-range turkey breasts and tofurkey, grass-fed behemoth leg sections and little wrapped hams, you sight small, fancifully-decorated bottles of cloned seadweller blood. Two go into your cart before you think too hard about it; one for Kanaya, and one for the capital-r Reasons that may or may not be trying to take over your consciousness.

[... _the herald it’s the herald the blade the seeking the outrider_...]

...Yes, that. For fuck’s sake.

For this one, you need a razor-cold night, clear as the sharpest ice-crystal, and a half-moon. It’s riding you, you can feel it in the back of your thoughts if you listen hard enough. Attention makes it louder, but less discordant, Indifference brings a low-level headache directly behind and between your eyes. All attempts to shut it out result in something like horrifically off-key music just out of earshot, and a migraine, neither of which help any of the reasons you want to shut in the first place, so it’s probably a blessing that Kanaya seems too busy finishing up her project to entertain the idea of anything but sleeping when you both go to bed. Still, you’re beyond relieved and close to throwing a goddamned party when meteorology complies neatly with the weather to bring a perfect night. The recent rains are due to depart in a tantrum of snow and ice before the week is up, scrubbing the atmosphere clean on the way out.

It takes forever for Kanaya puts her work away for the evening, but around one you hear the music, lower now than it had been, stop entirely. She slips off to the bathroom like a ghost, and you hear the shower hiss to life. Glancing around, you get up from your spot at the counter and laptop, and head for the cabinet under the sink to haul out the Toolbox of Nether Dooms.

Every self-respecting artsy lesbian needs a well-stocked toolbox, or so you like to quip to see who’s paying attention. Yours is painted pink, decorated with an elegant black floral motif as well as its title. It's also steel and weighs roughly forty pounds. Inside, an array of screwdrivers and wrenches in common sizes and configurations, a tape measure, a hammer, a little hand-axe, a box of nails and another of screws, a stud-finder, a level, some painter’s and plumber’s tape, and, finally, what you’re after, a handful of paintbrushes. You pick out the half-inch, stare at it for a moment, cast it back in favour of the inch-wide one. Your meditations on the rider keep summing up to a circle, written in Words. You really, really hate that this whole thing has you thinking in capitalisations like that; turning everything into a title is a crutch for shit fantasy writers.

You leave everything you’ll need on the counter, and go to bid Kanaya goodnight. She’s used to you staying up far later than she does, doesn’t blink at it in the least, but you can’t help but feel like you’re thirteen again, plotting how best to sneak out in the middle of the night to spite your mother. Guilt begins to gnaw at your insides. In the bedroom, she’s in a nightshirt and drowsing already, flipping through a fat paperback by the yellowish light of her bedside lamp. It looks like the troll porn sensation _Fifty Shades_.

“Please tell me you did not pay for that.” You sit down next to where she lay, frowning theatrically at the back of the book until her lips quirk up.

“Even I have standards, Rose.” She yawns, blinks, wiggles her toes. “I found it at the laundromat.”

“I guess I can forgive it this time.” Kanaya smiles, then her face goes serious, concerned.

“Don’t stay up until dawn again. You look like you haven’t been sleeping enough. I mean, even for one whose craft seems predicated on delirium, self-abuse and brewed beverages.”

“I’ll be fine. I’ll be in, in a bit. Some writing has been giving me more trouble than I was prepared for, that’s all.”

“Mmm. Good luck then."

“Goodnight. Enjoy your smut.” You kiss her, sparing a moment of astonishment at just how happy this small act, this whole lamplit scene, can make you. Then you go back out to the kitchen and your gathered supplies, and your monsters.

A bowl, a brush, a bottle of blood. The violet seemed right when you saw it, especially given the myths in this world that seadwellers were the result of tinkering by something that sounded very much like your Outer Circle. They’re now taken about as seriously as the ones about humanity really and truly being made of mud by divine hands, but perhaps it’s the thought that counts. You pour a small amount into your bowl; in the moonlight it is dead black and far thicker than you know human blood to be, but seadwellers run cold and so, so slow. One of your favourite things in this new world is the wealth of knowledge available on troll physiology. In fact you’d taken to pirating one or two of the academic journals on the subject, usually restricted to students and actual MDs. _Maybe I should stop this. Maybe I should go back inside and put a whole shitload of honey and bourbon in my tea, and forget this. I could reread that article on the indigo-to-violet range and the frequency of spontaneous gill appearances compared to..._

[... _NO no not yet no you must finish this procession there are rules there is an ORDER_...]

The voice makes your hands twitch and your vision go to static for a moment, then it’s just you and your breathing, burning in the sharp, winter air, and the lingering fear that maybe it’s just you and your cracking, broken brains after all, that this will all crescendo in a spectacular grand mal, and your frozen body on the roof. Somewhere, a siren dopplers away, fades into nothing.

[... _circles in circles in spirals in everything in all things bring me to you_...]

 _Well_ , you think. _If Kanaya’s going to find me half-frozen on the roof like the little fucking Match Girl of Dunwich, let’s at least give her something to tell_. You dip the brush, once, twice, and apply a dark smear to the concrete, extend it into a curve. It’s slow going; your medium is hard to manipulate in the cold, but after some time, you have a rough circle, nearly twice your height in diameter. The moment you finish and stand to survey your work, your rider takes over. You watch yourself kneel, your hands tracing writing in the tongue of the Outer Circle while the thing in your hindbrain whispers to itself, muttering under your breath in the same weird, urgent cadence it addressed you in, all of it too distant and quick to make any sense of. Its hand is far more certain; tight, winding lines of script coil inward from the edge, filling the space in little time. When it lets go, you drop the brush and shake out nerveless fingers until they’re approaching warm again, backing away further as a stray gust becomes more than that, wraps itself around you, whispering and whip-sharp.

The first sign of the thing calling itself the Herald is a flicker of shadow at the centre of your bloody brushwork. It unfolds weirdly, liquid and coiling in the frigid air, wrapping in on itself, sliding into the shape of a figure. Something about it itches at you; there’s a loose-limbed challenge to how it stands, a suggestion of familiar clothing, like an afterthought of a three-piece suit in unrelieved black. All of these things are almost your brother, and that ‘almost’ is deeply unnerving, as it has no face. Instead, a field of stars swims across a blankness where features should be. You watch, and it splits wide in a razored grin.

[... _youaretheywhohavebeenscratchscratchscratchingatouredges_...]

[... _stepintothecirclecomeclose_...]            [... _littlething_...]

Part of one of its hands flows upwards, extends into a long, sleek blade. It flicks the blade in your direction, still grinning like everything the dark has ever hidden from humanity. Your needlewands sing a discordance in response from your coat pocket, and you stuff one hand in there, gripping them both tight. It draws back into a sketch of a fighting stance; it wants a fight. It’s fucking _testing_ you. Very well. Before you can think too hard about exactly how stupid this is, you step over the edge of the circle, take one Thorn in each hand, and brace your stance.

The thing is breathlessly fast. It moves in long, lazy arcs, changing direction in sharp jerks as you duck or hop out of the way and counter, then it’s back to the give-no-fucks motion of a strike, aiming through either zen or apathy and always a flicker from connecting despite that. It’s eerily like sparring with Dave, only sped up half again. You can’t get close despite yourself, and earn a few grazing slashes for your effort, scalpel-neat across one cheek, a stinging glance just above your knee. _This is play, but it is also very fucking serious, and you don’t want me to forget either end of that, do you?_

Then it clicks; the thing plucked this fighting style directly from your memory, along with a form to wear. You smile to yourself, _so_ smug, and go on the defensive for a bit, waiting for it to go for you again and confirm your suspicion. There, yes, exactly what you’re watching for. It’s stolen his movements, meaning it’s also stolen his weaknesses. Sometime on the meteor, he’d hit fourteen and started growing like a weed given illegal hormone treatments. After that first growth spurt, his abominable fucking reach became something of a weakness if you knew how to use it, and you and Terezi had made it a solemn and holy mission to learn how to do just that, in the interests of knocking him down a peg.

As the Herald draws back, you push your hand, darting inside and under its reach before it can anticipate this. Its other hand reaches for you, but you get the tip of one Thorn at what serves as its throat first. The other pricks near where, were it human, it would be nothing but soft abdomen, bruising the blackness with strangely-coloured light. It laughs, a rasping, scraping sound. You blink, and both of its hands are empty, palms splayed and facing you. You’re staring down a nebula, only to find it’s fucking tickled by the whole situation.

[... _thisisathingyouhaveearnedyouarehonedfineabladesobright_...]

[... _youamuse...]_

 [... _agiftfromusfortheproperstepstherightwayforlaughter_...]

Enormous, burning-cold hands wrap around your face like a blindfold, as gently as you would handle a day-old baby bird. Something shifts inside you, but you’re not sure what through the penetrating chill.

When you open your eyes, the Herald is gone, the moon is nearly set, and yet, you can see as well as if you’d been born the seadwelling troll Kanaya admitted to hoping you had been before you met. The city’s light in the distance is an aurora, the stars a brilliant smear across the sky. You’re not sure how to feel about this, but the inside of your skull is blessedly fucking quiet, free of eldritch stowaways, and you are suddenly tired to your very bones.

 You barely remember returning to your apartment, washing your implements, and falling into bed. Without even trying, you sleep for a little over ten hours. You open your eyes to afternoon light burning around the curtains like the seams to your little, dark world giving way. Just that small bit of brilliance hurts like an icepick to the skull. _I don’t remember drinking last night. I do remember something...oh,_ fuck _. The roof_.

Simply shambling over to the mirror is no good, not with the contrast of light and shadow dazzling you and keeping your vision from adjusting one way or the other. So you open the curtains,  slowly so as not to bring on a full-on headache, and once you adjust as much as you’re going to, you squint into the mirror. Your eyes are the same pale violet and white, except your pupils are little slits, drawn tight against the brilliance. It’s not an unpleasant aesthetic, but problematic. You cock your head and sigh, watching your reflection do the same.

“I guess the charade was going to end sometime.”

Kanaya is suspicious when you show her, and furious when you explain. It’s always been hard to read anger with her, she doesn’t level the same kind of outright, demonstrative explosions at you that she would at, say, Eridan or Vriska, so you’re stuck reading her body language. As you explain, you can watch as she draws herself up in increments, ramrod straight, so as to better regard you down her nose. Twin blotches of pale jade show on her cheeks, and her lips go thin. She sets down several pins from the thing she’s been working on and turns her music down. Today, it’s Biber’s Mystery Sonatas. So that’s where that set of cds got off to.

“When were you planning on telling me?”

“When I knew what the point of it all was. When I got past neat tricks and bullshit to...I don’t know, something I can put words to.”

“Not before you decided to see if you could rip this world apart like the last ones were? You know, after all of the terrible things we went through to mend it?”

“That’s not what I wanted! I-”

“Stop! Stop right there. I am happy, here. I love you, but sometimes you do not think beyond throwing the expectations and prodding the comfort zones of those around you. As restless and discomfited as you are with what you see as mundane, I could not be happier. I don’t have a role to fill, I can do what I want to, here. What gives you existential small-dwelling-block fever is a paradise of possibility for me.”

You stare at your fingers, at the folds of burgundy and cream hanging off her dress form, squint at the light from outside shining through a row of aloes and stone plants she’s lined up in her windowbox. “This, to me, is restriction, compared to what I've tasted. It’s not like I dislike having the world again, but if it weren’t for all that we went through, I wouldn’t have you. I wouldn’t be in a three month stalemate with Sollux in an online chess game from hell, or occasionally getting drunken and spectacularly topless selfies from Vriska and Meenah while they trawl the Pacific for treasure and pretty locals to molest. I would still be talking to Dave and John and Jade on the internet, possibly never having seen them in person. The experience fucked every one of us so hard, but it gave us all amazing things, and now reality wants me to shut up and act like it all never happened? No, sorry, I want to be certain it did.” Kanaya softens a little, chews her lip. She’s still not happy, but she doesn’t pull away when you lean into her shoulder.

“Why this way? You could push at the limits of your god powers.”

“Because I've already tested those limits, and it’s the only other thing that didn’t find a neat, safe little slot, here, making me wonder if I dreamed it all. And maybe because I’m me and I can’t help stirring these things.” Now she does turn to face you, her neat brows knit upward in the centre.

“I was going to tell you when you woke, anyway, that I need to take the car for a few nights. They want to see my work in person, and show me the others’, and see how it all fits as a whole line. I am going to get a hotel room, during. Can I trust you to prove these things to yourself before I return on Sunday evening? Without pulling reality apart again?”

“I hope so.”

 

 

The only light in the apartment comes from a circle of candles, from their twins reflected again and again in a circle of tall mirrors facing inward, the lambent glow of light off the pale walls. Thick, spiralled strokes of watercolour in ivory black describe an odd-angled shape half again your height across, filled with spirals and slashes.

'Ivory Black’ is a misnomer, the pigment, once made from scorching ivory and powdering the result, has actually been derived from charred bones since the ivory trade ceased, a very important point for this exercise. You’ve mixed the pigment with incense ash and a small amount of your own blood. It shouldn’t remain after some judicious scrubbing, but you’ve also spent the better part of the evening getting cosy with your laptop and a bottle of cheap Malbec, drafting some kind of apology, just in case something stains or you become some kind of sentient slime mold splayed across the ceiling or something else happens you haven’t thought of yet. If anyone ever asks, the wine is ritual preparation, and in no way guilt or fear.

You face yourself in the largest of the mirrors, your reflection backlit, wearing only underpants and a camisole; a stray draft prickles the skin on your arms, your neck, making you shiver despite that you’ve turned the heat up some. Breathing, first. A count of ten as you breathe in, held for that same count, out again and held again. You keep going, in and hold and out and hold, over and over. It stills your mind, evens the spikes in your attention, bringing everything around you into sharp relief. Stillness is the first threshold. You’re not sure how long you hold that rhythm. In fact, you make a point to not notice; it could be scant minutes or hours or even days. Your breath is a tide, just as implacable as the oceans and the moon’s pulling on them, and that tide scours your head clean of intruding thoughts. All there is, is you and now.

Then you fill that emptiness with the shape you’ve drawn on the floor, connecting all of the mirrors in a very particular way. You see, in your mind’s eye, the way the light travels between them all, and the negative spaces it leaves behind. When you open your eyes again, all of the mirrors have gone black. All of the candles have a distinct silvered-violet edge to their light, and your reflection is no longer yours. It’s you, yes, but carved of slick black glass. It’s still essentially your face, but sharpened and hungry and feral, somehow.

You watch the doppelganger mirror your movements, eyes widening in time with your own, blinking, reaching forward in the same unconscious fascination, then breaking from the masquerade to wink.at you and smile with needled little teeth. You watch, transfixed, as it pushes forward, face forming from the mirror’s fluid surface. One hand reaches out, and tips your chin up, as if for inspection.

_Hello, Rose._

What pulls itself free to step out of the mirror’s frame looks like you, moves like you. Its voice is the one you hear when you speak, the voice of your thoughts. You step backwards, and it follows you, keeping just inside your personal boundaries. This small thing is the tip of a far larger entity; the room feels crowded with her in it. You swallow, lick your lips, and speak.

“This is disappointing. And kind of trite. Confronting me with my shadow-self, really?”

 _This is not exactly a confrontation, is it? Obviously, shadows and the things within do not bother you. But that’s why you’re so fascinating, why you stood out, even at the beginning. You seek out the cracks in things._ She paces around you, hands clasped at the small of her back, eyes mostly closed. Motes of candlelight slide over her surfaces. You note that your double is entirely naked, and that detail is far less discomfiting than it should be. _We want to give you something._

“Oh, really?”

 _You are the reason we exist here, you know. Your hand in recreating this world brought us through, and we are exceedingly grateful._  Oh, fuck. A childhood spent consuming horror novels helps you map out all the ways for this tragic tale to end.

“I don’t suppose you could make a normal, human life appealing to me.” Your double actually laughs at this. She passes behind you, and you restrain the urge to turn and follow her movements.

 _What is normal? It is a median, an averaging of experience, while you have ‘outlier’ written on the bones of your soul. No, I cannot change your mind or your experience, nor would I, if I could. All of this would have happened eventually, anyway. Only not so controlled, and you remember the last time you let yourself fall in._  Hands fall on your shoulders. Her grip is warmer than expected, but the voice at your ear prickles all the hairs on the back of your neck. _You are kin, now_. 

“Excuse me?” Her arms wrap around your waist in answer, all of her pressing against you from behind. The contact makes your head swim, and you wonder if what you think it means is really something you want confirmed.

 _Relax_. She turns you to face her. There are tiny patterns of scales across her, little whorls and stripes, a ridge of them where your eyebrows are. She does not breathe or blink. _You owe us nothing, but we owe you everything. There is no trick, and those were not tests. You’re still primarily human at the moment, perhaps you will understand this_. She kisses you. You kiss yourself, and she’s very polite about her little piranha teeth. Her tongue is fever-warm and deft, and it rasps at yours until your toes curl, and you’re not thinking anymore, just responding. She wears your face and carries so much fucking power in her that it’s like making out with a hurricane, and for some reason this terrible being is treating you like an equal and all at once it clicks into place. You stop and pull away, though strong hands at your hips keep you from stepping out of her embrace entirely.

“That was a courting. I’m this world’s Emissary. I’m part of the Noble Circle.”

 _In a sense, yes_.

“What does that mean?”

 _Not very much, yet, and that, as well as the knowledge of it, is our gift. We will wait until your mortal shell has expired to take you home_. You raise an eyebrow at this.

“And if I had not somehow made my way into this good favour?”

 _You would have met me at the river instead of in your dwelling-place, and I would not be nearly this gentle about marking your initiation. Now hush._ Her mouth closes over yours again, and she holds you close, sliding in and out of solidity. Bits of her extend out to touch and taste the air, your skin, to slip under your clothes and begin sliding them off. It’s not as distressing as it should be; there’s something of ritual to the whole proceeding that quiets your reservations, far outside of the candles and the mirrors and the sigils on the floor. That’s all _human_ ritual. Hers is in how she’s let go of cohesion from the waist down, slipping and pressing into you in all the right places with countless appendages, after she helps you out of your clothes. She’s keeping together enough of a torso to leave you something to hold to, improbably strong arms around your waist, the rest of her winding everywhere. The clinical part of you is going to have a field day with this, later. For now, you wonder if being well and proper fucked by what amounts to your own shadow-self counts as a Jungian interpretation of Freud, or the other way around. You wonder at how this doesn’t bother you in the least, but why would it? You think of Kanaya, and what you’re going to tell her, and the absurdity of all of it threatens to crack you open.

_Focus. Your thoughts are all over the place. Focus on where I touch, and what I am doing, and pay attention. This isn’t just for fun. _You listen; you’re on your knees in a pool of living ichor that writhes against you inside and out, holding you up. You feel hollowed out, all you are is sensation, washing away the bits of you still trying to dissect this. Then you see what she means, how the substance of her moves against you so nicely, so different from fingers or tongues, the texture of it and how what the two of you are made of need not be so different after all, and as you come...__

...you come _apart_...

It’s dawn before you can stop losing cohesion long enough to get some fucking sleep. Just in case, you curl up in the tub with the drain stoppered, on a blanket that you’re sure will never be clean again. You go down hard and dreamless, and when you wake up, you’re bubbling a little. Everything smells like rain, and it's probably your fault the bathroom is filled with fog. It takes you most of that day to get back to a functional human form that can consume coffee. No matter how hard you try, the eyes remain stubbornly reptilian.

Once you are whole and thoroughly caffeinated, and feeling something approaching a baseline again, you realise that your apartment is a fucking disaster. It was a mess even before you started any of this, and it’s suddenly very, very important to you that it not be when Kanaya comes home. Maybe it’s nerves, maybe it’s a chance to do anything that isn’t thinking about the conversation that’s to come. Neighbours be damned; you put on some Radiohead and turn the volume up. Then you get out the bleach, a mop and a pail of scalding-hot water, a trashbag and one of the lurid blue recycling bags the borough gives out. _Everything in its right place, indeed_.

If they’re going to leave you alone until you grow old and die, then what changes? Is that even what they meant, though? You stop gathering up stray dishes and focus for a moment, watching your fingertips melt and stretch into claws, then back. No, you don’t think things could ever have been normal again for you, even before this revelation. This just makes it a bit more personal.

It’s past midnight when you’ve fnished, finally purging all the energy of doubt from your system. You’ve draped yourself across the couch and begun to doze when Kanaya calls to let you know she’s not far, and did you want anything from the diner down the road? You look at the bags of stuff to be taken out, heave a sigh and tell her to get you three eggs over-hard and rye toast with honey, and you vacillate on the question of potatoes long enough that she decides you’re too tired or hungry to think properly and orders them anyway.

“So. Are you finished?”

“...in a sense.”

“In a sense?” Her voice goes hard-edged.

“Look, it’s complicated, but...Kanaya, apparently this kind of thing is as much a part of me as your being a vampire, and I can’t even begin to explain right now because I just finished scouring the apartment like an overdosed Adderall patient, after relearning what is human form, how do I body?-”

“Ah. What?”

“-but I can promise you, without conceit or self-deception, that while things might continue being really fucking weird for and around me, it will not be like the game. I am not losing control that spectacularly ever again.” She takes so long to answer that you wonder if she’s hung up on you, if you’ve finally overstepped that boundary, and she’s not coming back. You listen to line noise and swallow, hard. Then you hear her thank someone, probably whoever’s manning the till at the diner, and return.

“Mother Grub help me, I have never met a human so in need of a moirail. But I trust you. And, Rose?”

“Hm?”

“We are not acting out your tentacle porn.” Maybe you should be taking this a bit more seriously, but the relief speaks first-

“I am going to consider that a challenge.”


End file.
